Riot Games Raises $2.35 Million For Charities During Worlds 2017

In September, Riot Games announced that they would match the 25 percent of their total revenue from the Championship Ashe and Ward sales during Worlds designated to go to the players’ prize pool, and donate it to three different charity funds. Players were given the choice to then decide which charity they wanted to donate to. In the past, all the funds generated from the Championship skin sales during the League of Legends‘ Worlds would be added to the players’ prize pool. Riot making the decision to donate showed much promise for the future of the company, especially when taking into consideration the totals that were raised during the rather brief time period in which donations were open.

Riot Games ended up raising over $2 million dollars for the three different charities during the World Championships for League of Legends. As mentioned above, players were able to vote on which charity they wanted their money donated to. The charity with the most votes received 50 percent of the total funds generated, while the other two organizations received 25 percent. The three organizations that players had the choice to vote for were:

BasicNeedshelps in sustaining programs which support people with a mental illness or epilepsy in low- and middle-income countries. Their goal is to train and engage enough local governments and various nonprofits so that these organizations have the necessary tools to build a working structure for health care that’ll last for an extended period of time.

Learning Equalityis an organization that believes in learning over everything, focusing their attention on bringing high-quality access to the Internet to places that don’t have it. In turn, this strategy will enable these countries to give their citizens access to an education with the potential of breaking the cycle of poverty circling around the world. They have plans to develop and launch their offline learning platform, Kolibri, a service that will grant students with rich, digital experiences in over 175 countries without them.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a foundation that crafts computers at a low cost so that people without access to them can learn the fundamentals of computer science and other exciting innovations the technology has to offer. For example, their coding education program, CoderDojo, is one of the great ways they give back to the community, by giving students from the age of 7-17 the opportunity to learn what they can create with technology. Even more coding dojos are on the horizon for the organization in countries all over the world.

BasicNeeds ended up taking home the 50 percent of donations, while Learning Equality and The Raspberry Pi Foundation brought home the smaller donations of 25 percent each. The totals were as follows: $1, 175,000.00 USD for BasicNeeds, $587,500 USD for Learning Equality, and $587,500 USD for The Raspberry Pi Foundation.

The final results–totaling to around $2.35 million–have shown that maybe video games aren’t such a bad thing after all, as your–and my–parents have always told us. There’s so much good going on behind the scenes, and that has a lot to do with, not just League of Legends’ community and Riot Games, but the gaming community as a whole. It’s great to see that so many people came together to help donate to these three important causes. And if you want to keep on giving to charities to make a huge difference, make sure to check out The Nerd Stash’s Twitch stream, which donates its earnings to the Kentucky Children’s Hospital, in association with Extra Life.